Rising Above Mediocrity
by Benjamin Geiger

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
— “Nineteen Eighty-four”, Chapter 1, by George Orwell

So, how long until a “liberating” army comes in and pulls down the billboards? (I, for one, welcome our new simian overlords.)

I had a debate with my Logic Design lab instructor last Friday, over the lab assignment. Here’s the entire assignment:

Design a sequencer using J-K flip-flops that has two cycles. The cycle 1 sequences 0, 2, 3, 4 and cycle 2 sequences 1, 5, 6, 7. An external input selects which cycles to perform. An input 0 selects cycle 1 and input 1 selects cycle 2. The cycles can be entered and exited only through states 0 and 1.

Basically, if the input is 0, the sequencer goes from state 0 to state 2 to state 3 to state 4 to state 0.

The question is what to do when the external input changes mid-cycle. Since “the cycles can only be entered and exited from states 0 and 1″, we assumed that the external input is completely ignored when the circuit is not in state 0 or 1. The circuit continues cycling through until it reaches 0 or 1, and then it switches cycles as necessary.

However, the lab instructor said that the proper, “obvious” behavior was to hold at the current state until the external input was restored. As you can see, this was never specified in the assignment.

The professor said he agreed with my interpretation, which leads to a question… Under what circumstances is it “obvious”? Did the lab instructor have a case, or was he simply being contrary?

I know it’s been nearly two months since I last posted, but I’ve been busy. So, here’s a rundown of the past few weeks.
There’s more! (click here to read)